playing dirtyred planet discoverieswhat is a library worth? building a better alloy

national academyof sciences member dan simberloffbattles biologicalinvaders

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ON THE COVER—Waging war against biological invaders is all in a day’s work for Dan Simberloff. Page 18

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Staying up late at the library with the Lib-Value project. Page 10

Creating healthier habits starts with playing in the dirt.Page 04

Better, stronger, more durable alloys.Page 08

Bitten by the research bug. Page 36

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VoluME 05, NuMbER 01

Table of ContentsOf Note 02Recent accomplishments and recognitions

Playing Dirty 04Natural playgrounds encourage healthy exercise habits

New Age Alloys 08Rethinking ingredients to create better, stronger materials

Maximizing Value 10Creating tools so libraries can prove their worth

Follow the Water 14The high-tech hunt for H20 and organic materials on Mars

Upsetting the Balance 18Dan Simberloff investigates the impact of biological invasions

What’s the Problem? 22Students collaborate to bring an invention to the marketplace

Natural Resilience 24Microbes enjoy making the modern world less toxic

Protecting Privilege in the Information Age 28Navigating the legal waters of electronic discovery

Faster Than Real Time 30Simulations set to revolutionize the world of transportation

More Than Just a Theory 34Drawing inspiration from an insightful political theorist

Unexpected Results 36Research experience alters the course of an academic career

© 2013 The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Articles published in Quest magazine and on the Quest website may be republished, in whole or in part, for educational, not-for-profit, and public service purposes so long as the author, the University of Tennessee, and Quest magazine are credited. For all other purposes, please contact the executive editor to request permission.

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Leveraging photosynthesis to generate electricity. Page 34

Drilling down for signs of life on Mars.Page 14

Bringing down the bullies.Page 08

Innovative and sustainable design lives at the New Norris House. Page 02

Oil-eating microbes step up to the buffet. Page 24

The end of the road for traffic congestion? Page 30

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Green House Garners National SpotlightFilled with energy-saving technologies, UT’s New Norris House was named one of the nation’s top ten examples of sustainable architec-ture and green design in 2013 by the American Institute of Architects and its Committee on the Environment. Some of the features that help the structure maintain its design standards are: a rainwater col-lection and storage system, use of natural ventilation, thicker walls, enhanced insulation, a low-flow shower, and a solar-powered hot water heater. The project is a multidisciplinary collaboration of the College of Architecture and Design, the College of Engineering, the Department of Environmental Studies, and Clayton Homes. Publications that have featured the New Norris House include ARCHITECT, Gizmodo, Scientific American, U.S. Building Digest, and Wired. Visit thenewnorrishouse.com for more.

Bye Bye BirdiesAn international research team including Alison Boyer, a research assistant professor in ecology and evolutionary biology, recently found that about 1,000 bird species became extinct due to human colonization. The study focused on the extinction rates of non-perching land birds in the Pacific Islands from 700 to 3,500 years ago. Using fossil records from forty-one islands, the team implemented an analytical technique to model gaps in the fossil record for more than 300 islands to determine the number of unknown extinct species. They estimate that nearly two-thirds of land bird populations dis-appeared between the years of the first human arrival and European colonization. The disap-pearances are linked to overhunting, forest clearance, and introduced species.

Meeting of the Medieval MindsUT’s Marco Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies was honored to host the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America in 2013. Top medieval scholars from around the world focused on the history and culture of the medieval era during the three-day meeting. The conference included nearly sixty lectures and panels on a wide range of interdisciplinary topics. Prizes were awarded to the top scholarly papers submitted by graduate students. “Hosting the MAA is a sign that our program here at UT continues to grow and enable research in a crucial area of the humanities,” says Heather Hirschfeld, Riggsby director of the Marco Institute.

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Two New Electron Microscopes OnlineUT has invested $3.5 million in two advanced elec-tron microscopes managed by the UT-ORNL Joint Institute for Advanced Materials (JIAM). The Zeiss Libra 200 Transmission Electron Microscope, with the magnification power of 1 to 10 million times, can resolve and image individual atoms. The Zeiss Auriga Crossbeam microscope has the magnification power of 100,000 and can cut through features as small as a few nano-meters. “The new instruments have the ability to probe, see, and characterize materials from the atomic scale up so we can make breakthrough discoveries in medicine, nuclear security, nanotechnology, and green power.” says George Pharr, JIAM director. They will be used for fundamental research as well as a training ground for students. Visit jiam.utk.edu for more.

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RECENTLY PUBLISHEDHealth Care Lab Goes SimulatedThe new Health and Information Technology Simulation (HITS) Laboratory adds more than 7,000 square feet to the UT College of Nursing’s space and opens the door to innovative technology such as human simulation manikins. The lab includes patient exam rooms, a pediatric inpatient room, an operating room, an intensive care unit, a medical surgical room, and a birthing room. Students and professors can watch simulated scenarios live in an observation lab, or watch recorded simulations to review performance. The HITS lab also facilitates research scenarios, including a study involving the use of smart-home technologies to assist with independent living for older adults.

Winning is No AccidentA collaborative website project cre-ated at UT called “Working Safely is No Accident” won the $15,000 grand prize in the Department of Labor Worker Safety and Health App Challenge. The contest en-couraged entities to build tools that educate the public about work-place safety. The winning site was a joint effort between the UT Con-struction Industry Research and Policy Center and the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineer-ing. It features a game designed to help workers ages 13–24 evaluate relative probabilities of interesting events, then apply the concepts to increasing workplace safety. Visit ilab.engr.utk.edu/cirpc for more.

Ernest Freeberg. The Age of Edison. New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2013. Freeberg places the story of Thomas Edison’s invention of the incandescent lightbulb in the context of a technologi-cal revolution that transformed America and Europe. In the end, Edison’s greatest invention was not any single technology, but rather his reinvention of the invention process itself.

Marisa Ensor. African Childhoods: Education, Development, Peacebuilding, and the Youngest Continent. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Ensor sheds light on African children’s often constructive engagement with a variety of societal conditions, adverse or otherwise, and their ability to positively influence their own lives and those of others.

Arthur Smith. The Fortunate Era. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013. From the open-ing poem, we follow a narrator through the loss of an Edenic life and its manifestations, from personal loss, to the extinction of species, and—looming in the future—the threat of our own extinction.

Dorothy Habel. When All of Rome Was Under Construction: The Building Process in Baroque Rome. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Architectural historian Habel considers the politics and processes involved in building the city of Rome dur-ing the baroque period.

Susan Benner and Joan Grim. Assessment of Young Children with Special Needs: A Context-Based

Approach. New York, NY: Routledge, 2012. This book helps prepare teach-ers to evaluate the skills of in-fants, toddlers, and preschool children with developmen-tal delays and

those considered at risk to experience developmental delays or difficulties.

Michael David Cohen. Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Cohen examines

the Civil War’s immediate and long-term impact on higher education by tracing col-lege communities’ responses to the seces-sion crisis and the outbreak of war.

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DirtyPlaying

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Dawn Coe loves seeing her daughter come home from school dirty. Especially on rainy days when the teacher takes everyone outside to jump in mud puddles scattered around the playground.

Playing outdoors in a natural setting may be tough on kids’ clothes, but it has been found to ultimately benefit their exercise habits and is a cheaper, easier alternative to more formally struc-tured play areas, according to research by Coe, an assistant professor of kinesiology, recreation, and sports studies at UT.

She originally became interested in examin-ing playground activity at UT’s Early Learning Center for Research and Practice (ELC)—where her daughter attends preschool—when the center decided to renovate its traditional playground into a more natural playscape. The ELC wanted to assess its decision and collaborated with Coe on the research idea.

Coe began by observing the children’s play habits in the original playground with its standard slide, swings, and shaded cement porch. She con-tinued throughout and after the seven-month ren-ovation as natural elements—including a slide built

By Meredith McGroarty

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into the side of a hill, logs for balance exercises, and trees with low-hanging branches on which children can (safely) swing—were incrementally introduced.

“Having these elements in the playground helps children make connections with nature. And they provide natural ways for children to learn motor skills development, like walking on the logs for bal-ance,” Coe explains.

One of Coe’s major findings was that the chil-dren appeared to participate in more continu-ous physical activity, whether it was walking up and down the hill to the slide, wandering over to the tree branches, or playing with the water. She believes this increase is partly due to the structure of the natural elements that allows several children to walk on a log or swing on branches at once. In contrast, only two or three kids can play on a stan-dard see-saw or swing set at a time, making the rest stand and wait their turn.

By providing features that allow several stu-dents to play at the same time, and interactive elements that emphasize exploration over com-petition, the new playground encourages a more inclusive style of recreation.

“The environment is very noncompetitive, and it allows a broader range of children to play and engage with the elements at once,” she explains. D

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cussion, but Coe says that natural playscapes are cheaper and safer than formally structured envi-ronments when planned properly. Grass or wood chips are a softer landing surface than asphalt, and logs can be more easily replaced than fitted parts for a swing set. Because the play structures can be simple things, like ropes courses or log balance beams, a natural approach can easily be adapted to a variety of environments, from urban to rural.

While Coe found measurable benefits in physi-cal activity among the children, she next wants to look at whether these benefits translate into gains in academic and other cognitive areas, such as classroom concentration or fine motor skills. She also is looking at turning her findings from the ELC research into a journal article.

“I think there needs to be more research in this area, and the ELC is using this playground as a recreational and educational resource, which is great,” Coe says.

The only possible drawback to the more natu-ral playground is the added laundry burden, but Coe says it is well worth a few extra loads to see her daughter interacting with nature and exercis-ing in ways that hopefully will carry over later into her life.

“My daughter is definitely a lot dirtier when she comes home now, but that’s really okay. It just shows she’s having fun,” she concludes.

She adds that the ELC has also been able to use the play area for practical instruction, such as teaching students how to lash sticks together.

Another advantage of the renovated area is its coolness. “Before the renovation, the kids spent a lot of time sitting on the porch in the shade, especially when it got warm. But the porch was just a cement area with some chairs; it wasn’t very engaging. Now there’s shade from trees and other plants across the area, so they can keep playing and not leave the shade,” Coe says. Shade is an important component in a hot climate like Tennessee’s.

Encouragingly, Coe found that the children’s interest in the play space didn’t wane after its nov-elty wore off—the children remained drawn to the activities long after the new space was completed. She notes that the landscape changes also led to the emergence of new styles of play for the chil-dren over time.

“The kids were engaging in more moderate to vig-orous activity—anything that’s a brisk walk up to a jog or a run—and spent less time sitting down. We didn’t measure this, but it seemed like they were being more creative and engaging more in active play, like using water from the creek. They also were engag-ing more with each other, rather than just sitting on a piece of playground equipment,” Coe explains.

With playground renovations, questions of safety and cost are always at the forefront of dis-

This and previous page: Children at the ELC explore the natural playscape.

DUSTIN BROWN

08 SPRING 2013

New Age

As carbon emissions choke our rapidly warming planet, researchers are scram-

bling to find cleaner ways to provide energy. Almost 40 percent of US electricity currently comes from coal, which is burned to drive steam turbines. But to reduce coal’s carbon foot-print, turbines will need to operate at higher temperatures.

Enter the world of Peter Liaw, UT professor of materials science and engineering and Ivan Racheff Chair of Excellence. Building on decades of research in structural alloys, he is leading a team responsible for creating and testing better materi-als for gas and steam turbine components, which will allow fuels to burn more cleanly and efficiently.

“Higher efficiency reduces costs and waste per unit of electricity generated,” says UT materi-als science and engineering department head Kurt Sickafus.

For centuries, alloys such as steel were made of one principal element and tiny amounts of several other elements that added desirable characteris-tics such as strength, resilience, ductility, or flex-ibility. But what if high-temperature alloys could comprise a more balanced combination of each principal element?

A variety of multi-element alloys have been around for years, but long-term exposure to high temperatures caused them to form new compounds that were less plastic, structurally unstable, and easily corroded. These were not good candidates for the high-temperature, high-pressure environment of a steam turbine.

Alloys

“ This is a new era, different from the iron-based steels.”

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Novel combinations of elements may be the key to the strongest heat-resistant materials ever created.

Peter Liaw UT professor of materials science and engineering, and Ivan Racheff Chair of Excellence

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By Amanda Womac

Nonetheless, as questioning researchers like Liaw will do, they kept experimenting and found a few simple microstructures that are not only workable, but also remarkable.

Known as high-entropy alloys (HEAs), they combine five or more elements in 5 to 35 percent atomic concentrations to create new materials with the potential to be far more than the sum of its parts: stronger, less brittle, longer lasting, and less expensive.

“This is a new era, different from the iron-based steels,” Liaw says. “Older alloys have been pretty thoroughly researched. These may be different.”

Together with doctoral students Michael Hemphill, Zhi Tang, Lou Santodonato, Zhinan An, and Haoyan Diao, among others, Liaw is creating, testing, and analyzing compositions of aluminum, chromium, copper, iron, manganese, and nickel. Their goal is to find HEAs that outperform con-ventional alloys.

Investigating materials at the atomic level is a painstaking process. First, a candidate alloy is evaluated based on its elements and composi-tion using a formulation rule devised by Liaw and other scientists. Before this evaluation tool existed, potential alloy combinations were tackled by trial and error—a very expensive and inefficient process with no guarantee of success.

“Now, with the theoretical formula to set us on the right track, we don’t waste time up front,” says Hemphill. The formula identifies workable HEAs; the question is, how well.

To find out how well, the researchers take advantage of the nearby Spallation Neutron Source at ORNL. At this world-class facility, neu-trons bombard the new material to measure the atomic lattice strain, making it possible to under-stand the material’s deformation behavior.

“Already, one HEA containing only a very small (9.1 atomic percentage) amount of aluminum looks promising under high stress and a temperature

well above that of conventional turbines,” Liaw says. “In studies of fatigue, the HEA material really stands out.”

“We’re finding information in the infant stages of an era,” Hemphill says. “This new alloy has many potential uses and promising industrial applications. Because these new materials may be less expensive and last longer, they’ll be more cost effective, especially for high-temperature applications.”

As promising as the alloy is, a great deal of meticulous research remains to be done. The team will continue adjusting the amounts of alu-minum in their formula until they come up with a winning combination of strength, ductility, and resistance to change in shape.

The HEA investigation is funded by a $300,000 award from the US Department of Energy. UT is one of only nine universities to receive support in this new area.

“Liaw’s research will benefit the world with the promise of increasing the efficiency of coal-fired power plants,” says Wayne Davis, dean of the College of Engineering.

Liaw says that this DOE project, his fourth, is the result of having his former professor Morris E. Fine from Northwestern University come and talk at UT almost a decade ago. “Maybe we should have him come here more often,” he jokes.

The new alloy has already drawn interest from big companies such as airplane manufacturer Boeing because of the material’s light weight and high temperature tolerance. The road to indus-trial application might take ten to twenty years, but HEAs may one day also have applications in advanced nuclear reactors, an area of particular interest to Zhi Tang. “This is an exciting new area,” Tang says. “Each small discovery makes a big dif-ference in the knowledge of this developing field.”

In a field this new and promising, it seems, no discovery will be truly small.

AlloysBy Cindy MoffettNovel combinations of elements may be the key to the strongest heat-resistant materials ever created.

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At 3:00 a.m. on any given morn-ing when most of

Knoxville is fast asleep, the Commons in UT’s John C. Hodges Library is alive and buzzing with students. Some are huddled in group rooms working on proj-ects, while others edit video in newly designed studios.

Students are increasingly considering the library as the place to be on campus—particularly the Commons, a recently renovated area that features a variety of stu-dent services and academic support.

But does the library actually contribute to their aca-demic success? That’s one of the primary questions the Lib-Value Project is trying to answer. The three-year collaborative study, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, comes at a time when many universities are facing financial challenges and competing needs for funding academic support.

“The project’s ultimate goal is to create surveys and tools that other university libraries can replicate to assess their services,” says Carol Tenopir, Lib-Value co-principal investigator and director of the UT Center for Information and Communication Studies. Project collaborators include researchers and librarians at the Photography by Dustin Brown

The Lib-Value Project develops tools to measure academic library worth and impact on student success.

By Lola Alapo

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University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Syracuse University; and the Association of Research Libraries.

Without the luxury of budget increases, many library lead-ers are being forced to make hard choices about which prod-ucts and services to fund based on the benefits they provide.

“These measures will help staff demonstrate their librar-ies’ impact to university administrators who make decisions about funding and donors who support library efforts,” Tenopir says. “Showing the return on investment is critical.”

Lib-Value works in teams, each developing measures for different library collections or services. Tenopir’s team led the project’s review of scholarly materials and measured their value to researchers and faculty members.

“We found that electronic collections are heavily used and contribute directly to the research productivity of faculty and students,” she says. “They have allowed UT faculty over the years to read more items without spending a lot more time and money. Library e-collections provide fast access to high- quality material.”

Although the library is the primary source of articles, its contribution to e-access may be underestimated as behind-the-scenes linking provides access to outside collections seamlessly through Google Scholar and other search tools.

By Lola Alapo

Teresa Walker, associate professor and head of Integrated User Services in Hodges Library, led a team that focused on measuring the Commons’ impact on student academic endeavors. Surveys of students in two undergraduate com-munication studies courses asked what library services each student used and what their feelings were about the value of the Commons to their UT experience.

The team also surveyed Commons visitors for two weeks during summer and fall 2011. Working with the UT Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, they were able to link the results with demographic data on student retention, suc-cess, and years to graduation.

“You can’t make the direct correlation between spaces and services and student retention, but you can see the trend,” Walker says.

Recent renovations to the space were an effort to bring numerous academic support services under one roof. These include the Student Success Center, Stat 201 Lab, Math Tutorial Center, Office of Information Technology, and Library Services. “We want to keep seeing that we’re meeting the needs of stu-dents and the greater university community,” Walker says.

The Teaching and Learning team, led by Rachel Fleming-May, an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences, and Regina Mays, an assistant professor and assess-ment librarian, also collected feedback from instructors about how they used library resources and services in their teaching. Survey results indicated that instructional support was being used; however, instructors need more information about the resources and services available to assist with their teaching.

“In the digital era, students and instructors are searching for guidance about how to use information legally and effectively,” says Walker, noting that the library has responded by adding classes on media literacy, including how to avoid plagiarism.

Another aspect the Lib-Value Project examined was the scope of library special collections, from rare books to digitized

Among the survey findings:

70% of students indicated the Commons made them feel

more involved in the university.

95% agreed the Commons facilitated group work and

collaboration.

85% responded that the Commons is a place where

they could get help with assignments.

Students who used technology services and research assistance the most were also students who made a 3.5 grade point average or above.

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photographs. Gayle Baker, professor and the library’s electronic resources coordinator, employed Google Analytics to track access to digitized collections.

Her team tallied how many users visited selected digital image collections, how they reached them, and from where in the world they were accessed. In one month, unique visitors from Knoxville, Tennessee; Berlin, Germany; Delhi, India; and many places in between visited the site.

Baker also found that many collections—the Great Smoky Mountains photos, for example—drew viewers through refer-rals from blogs. A review of these blogs suggested that visitors weren’t always academics. “The collections not only appealed to historians, but also everyday people with specific interests in the Smoky Mountains,” Baker says.

The researchers also realized that the library has to do a better job branding its collections so viewers know they belong to UT. “It’s name recognition,” she says. “It might also encourage people to contact us for other donations or to allow their col-lections to be digitized.”

As the project comes to a close, Lib-Value researchers have been traveling the globe to share what they’ve learned and pro-vide useful tips on how other university libraries can use similar research methods.

The Lib-Value Project web site, libvalue.cci.utk.edu, offers access to databases, assessment tools, and a series of web-casts that explore the findings.

UT plans to continue studying the library’s impact on stu-dent learning over the next several years. The library staff antic-ipates the Commons will play a crucial role in that long-term examination. Judging by the results gathered so far, there will be plenty more late nights to come.

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It’s the middle of the day in sunny southern California. Aluminum foil blacks out windows in the apartments rented by sleeping scientists Linda Kah and Jeffrey Moersch. As the sun begins to fade into the Pacific, they awaken to join hundreds of others like them in analyzing datasets beamed from millions of miles away.

Kah and Moersch are part of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover team that is looking for evidence that Mars is or ever was capable of support-ing life. “These clues could be water-bearing minerals, organic com-pounds, or other chemical ingredients related to life,” Moersch says.

A Sol in the LifeFor the first three months, the two associate professors from UT’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences worked at the mission’s home base, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. The odd hours were a necessity because they were living on Mars time, where a day—called a sol—is roughly forty minutes longer than Earth’s.

“We were typically working more than twelve hours a day,” Kah says. “Our schedules moved each day, usually forward about an hour for several days, then jumped back a couple of hours, then forward again.”

They have since returned home to Knoxville, with its familiar twenty-four-hour days, and continue their duties remotely. To help accommo-date both life and work, schedules are now compressed to seven-hour shifts that begin in the mid-morning. The team has also moved to pre-planning several days of activity at once, so researchers can have the weekends with their families.

Kah, who studies the role of microbial life in the formation of some of Earth’s earliest rocks, is responsible for closely inspecting Martian rocks the same way.

“For years, I have used the same set of observations that Curiosity is making to investigate ancient rocks,” Kah says. “I look for microscopic details visible in layers of rock, unusual assemblages of minerals, and the chemistry of both mineral and organic material to decipher clues to the presence of life.”

Kah does not work with the naked eye. She uses Curiosity’s sophisti-cated array of cameras and technology to inspect the Martian surface.

For example, as the rover slowly moves across Gale Crater, a robotic arm is used to gather, sieve, and transfer soil and powdered rock sam-ples into the rover’s analytical system.

“We then use instruments capable of detecting both organic mol-ecules and the isotopic signatures often left in rocks. On Earth, these signatures often indicate microbial metabolisms,” Kah says. “The rover has the most advanced technology of any yet sent to Mars. It’s like a field geologist with an analytical laboratory on her back.”

While Kah was at JPL, datasets were downlinked from Mars twice a sol. She recalls the anticipation as 250 scientists from several scientific teams—geology, mineralogy and geochemistry, and environmental science—made a “mad dash” to retrieve and examine the data. They would then use their combined expertise to develop the best targets to answer the most pertinent questions.

F o l l o W T h EThe search for life on Mars begins with a high-tech hunt for H2O and organic materials.By Whitney Heins

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“After this, representatives essentially got together in a room and fought it out,” Kah says. “Also in that room were long-term planners that reminded everyone what the goals of the mis-sion were so we didn’t get sidetracked by every interesting little rock that we passed by. In order to draw a coherent picture, we need to be sure to collect a coherent set of data.”

Seeking Hidden Hydrogen Moersch is working things from a different angle. He uses a neutron spectrometer called the Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) to search for hydrogen, an ingredient important for life that is chemically bound in water or hydrated minerals such as clays or some sulfates. The objective is to map the abundance of hydrogen from the surface down to about one meter below.

DAN, supplied to the mission by the Russian Space Agency, operates in two modes: passive and active.

The passive mode operates naturally as a result of neutrons produced in the subsurface by cosmic rays raining down from space through the Martian atmosphere. Neutrons produced continuously by the rover’s nuclear power plant also contribute. These neutrons interact with other particles in the subsurface, with some eventually leaking out to where they can be detected by the instrument.

DAN characterizes the energies of these escaped neutrons, enabling the science team to determine how much hydrogen is present.

“We do this by characterizing the speed, or energy, of the neutrons,” says Moersch, who worked on five previous missions to Mars, includ-ing the Spirit and Opportunity rovers.

“Neutrons and hydrogen are of comparable mass, so if a neutron hits a hydrogen nucleus, it will bounce back at half speed on average—like a pool ball colliding with another pool ball. If a neutron hits something that is heavier—any nuclei other than hydrogen—it would be like a ping pong ball hitting a bowling ball, with very little speed lost by the neutron,” he explained.

The active mode uses a small particle accel-erator onboard the rover to produce neutrons in pulses that interact below the surface. This mode offers the additional benefit of being able to mea-sure the time neutrons arrive after each pulse.

“Neutrons that interacted with hydrogen fifty centimeters deep take longer to return to the spectrometer than those that interacted with hydrogen close to the surface,” Moersch says. “So it is possible to make a crude estimate of the ver-tical distribution of hydrogen using this mode.”

In addition to their scientific duties at JPL, both Kah and Moersch served as Payload Uplink Leads for their respective instruments. In these roles,

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The “John Klein” area on Mars was chosen for the first rock drilling sample due to the presence of complex mineralized veins (white arrow) and abun-dant round masses of sedimentary rock (black arrow). Both imply the presence of mineral-forming fluids at the time these rocks were first deposited.

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“ The rover has the most advanced technology of any yet sent to Mars. It’s like a field geologist with an analytical laboratory on her back.” Linda C. Kah, Kenneth R. Walker Professor and associate professor of carbonate sedimentology & geochemistry

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Kah and Moersch acted as the critical interface between the science and engineering teams, con-verting the science team’s wishes into tasks the instruments were capable of performing.

Chris Tate, a UT graduate student in physics who is being mentored by Moersch, served as a second-shift Payload Uplink Lead. Each sol, Tate would translate the scientific tasks into instrument-level commands to be executed by the rover.

“Sometimes we’d look up in the sky and see this red dot and know that we were commanding a spacecraft on something millions of miles away,” Moersch says. “It’s pretty astonishing.”

A Curious DiscoveryLess than a year into the mission, NASA announced some major discoveries based on an analysis of powder from the first drilled sample from Mars.

Using critical data from Curiosity’s instrument payload, including DAN and the spectral-imaging capability of onboard cameras, the team was able to determine that a mudstone rock sample—named “John Klein” by the research team—recorded past environmental conditions favorable for microbial life. Additional findings suggest these conditions likely extend far beyond the analysis site.

“This allows us to tell a new story about Mars that we haven’t been able to tell before,” Kah says. “The excitement is high that we can consider part of our mission accomplished. But the fun has only just begun!”

Kah and Moersch feel certain they will find more evidence of the building blocks of life. If they are proven right, then the question becomes, “is life on Earth a unique phenomenon, or can life evolve wherever the conditions are right, as it may have been on Mars billions of years ago?”

“If that is the case, then perhaps life is all over the galaxy,” Moersch says. The question then becomes “where wouldn’t there be life?”

LEFT: Curiosity’s first drill holes at the “John Klein” area. Each hole is about 0.6 inches in diameter. The deepest hole penetrated 2.5 inches into the Martian subsurface.

BELOW: Analysis by instruments onboard Curiosity confirmed the drilled rock sample contained water-bearing smectite clay minerals and sulfate (bassanite). Combined, it suggests Mars once had neutral-pH liquid water, which is a favorable environment for a variety of microbial metabolisms.

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National Academy of Sciences member Dan Simberloff investigates the impact of biological invasions.By Whitney Heins

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The hemlock woolly adelgid. Asian carp. Kudzu. What do these three things have in common? They are dangerous killers transported from other parts of the world years ago that are now disrupting the ecologi-cal equilibrium in several areas of the United States. These invasive species are wreaking economic, ecological, and envi-ronmental havoc because no natural predators, parasites, or diseases can keep their populations in check.

Dan Simberloff, distinguished professor and the Gore Hunger Professor of Environmental Studies in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, has dedicated his life to studying the threat of invasive species, which continues to grow as the world’s borders erode.

“I’ve always been interested in how certain species fit together or don’t fit together in ecological communi-ties,” explains Simberloff, who, as a boy growing up in rural Pennsylvania, collected and pinned insects, read insect books, and started his own ‘Society of Entomology’ at the age of four. “That is how I got interested in biological invasions, because you have these species being inserted into a previously existing ecological community, and either they survive or they don’t.”

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Simberloff’s curiosity spurred a distinguished fifty-year career that earned him the highly coveted election to the National Academy of Sciences, the Eminent Ecologist Award in 2006, and the Ramon Margalef Prize in Ecology in 2012.

In 1971, he won the Mercer Award for his work with his Harvard University doctoral advisor, Edward O. Wilson, which tested the theory of island biogeography.

Simberloff’s research has informed policy, includ-ing President Bill Clinton’s executive order 13112 to create the National Invasive Species Council.

The 800-page Encyclopedia of Biological Invasions, co-edited with Marcel Rejmánek of the University of California, Berkeley, is a direct result of Simberloff’s investigations. He also has writ-ten a new book, Invasive Species: What Everyone Needs to Know, to help the public better under-stand the threat.

An Island conundrumSimberloff, who also directs UT’s Institute for Biological Invasions, has been around the world with shovels, nets, and traps studying fire ants, moths, mongooses, and weasels.

One of his recent stops was an island sitting in a large glacial lake in the Patagonian region of Argentina. What piqued Simberloff’s interest was its population of more than a hundred types of trees from every continent but Antarctica.

“Imagine clumps of ponderosa pines inter-mingled with fruit trees, Douglas firs, and maples,” Simberloff says. “Trees sandwiched inside a small

park on a small island only twenty kilometers long and four kilometers wide.”

Known as Isla Victoria, it was the site of a government experiment initiated in the 1920s to find the fastest growing trees. The Argentines abandoned the project a decade later and let the greenery run amok.

Today, the island may look unharmed. Some might even call it beautiful. But beneath its beauty lurks the potential for ecological disaster.

“Many of these tree species, when intro-duced, lead to invasions in which they turn prai-ries into forests, cause conservation problems, and threaten the existence of native species,” Simberloff says.

In 2001, Simberloff and Martin Nuñez, an Argentinian graduate student and later post-doctoral researcher at UT, pulled on their hiking boots, grabbed some clippers, and headed out to census the implanted trees. They counted 1,643 trees, including sixty-two broad-leaf tree spe-cies—about a third were invasive—and seventy-three conifers, including sixty percent of the world’s most invasive conifer species.

While these species have had dire ecological consequences in the past, strangely this was not what Simberloff observed on Isla Victoria. “Even if they were famous invaders, they weren’t spread-ing,” Simberloff says. “This was puzzling.”

Instead, only two of the many known invasive conifers—Douglas firs and junipers—were thriv-ing. So the real question became, why weren’t the supposedly invasive conifers more invasive?

This led to a series of projects that pointed to a surprising answer buried deep within the ground.

Unseen ecosystemsFirst, Simberloff and his team looked high, asking the most logical question—is the climate respon-sible for the lack of growth? They conducted a literature review to examine the climate the trees needed in order to live and determined this was not the problem.

Next, they looked lower. As it happens, two European deer species were introduced at the same time the plantation was established. The researchers built exclosures to study the impact of the deer’s presence on the trees. They also performed feeding experiments to observe what they were eating. Although the deer browsed, trampled, and killed some trees, the impact was not significant enough to explain the phenom-enon Simberloff was witnessing.

If deer weren’t the answer, maybe another species was responsible. Simberloff and Nuñez wondered if rodents were eating the seeds. To

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test this hypothesis, they placed seeds in areas with and without rodents to find out which seeds the rodents preferred, and the distances they carried them. The team concluded rodents were probably impeding the invasion, but only minimally.

Finally, Simberloff and Nuñez looked below the ground at something unseen but vital to ecosys-tems—mycorrhizal fungi. These fungi develop a symbiotic relationship with the root systems of living plants. Networks of mycorrhizal filaments envelop the seedling’s root structure, supporting the plant’s own ability to extract water and nutri-ents from the soil.

“The associations between trees and fungi are often host-specific,” Simberloff explains. “Mycorrhizal species will frequently associate only with a certain type of conifer tree, so the impact of mycorrhizal fungi and their absence can be staggering. The trees might stop growing and start dying.”

A series of greenhouse and field experiments tested tree growth with and without the fungi. They found new trees planted in both environ-ments thrived with fungi while the ones without fungi did not grow.

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Dan Simberloff works with doctoral student Sara Kuebbing on an invasive plant species in a UT greenhouse.

Simberloff and Nuñez concluded that the lack of vital fungi was being caused by yet another missing element: squirrels.

“In a normal environment, fungi would be spread by an animal that would dig and spread it, like squirrels,” Simberloff says. “But this area does not have a native animal to do that.”

In essence, the mystery of why the conifer trees have not spread through-out Isla Victoria was solved. But true to his nature, Simberloff is not done asking questions. His studies continue with a secondary investigation of the impact of a wild boar invasion on the island. The boar are eating the fungi, defecating, and thus possibly accelerating the conifer popula-tion after all.

As the global economy expands, more and more invasive species will undoubt-edly be revealed as scientists unravel the complicated network of interactions that lead to invasion impacts. Simberloff’s work will continue to help counter these threats and restore nature’s delicate balance.

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JIM MOLES

What’s the Problem

By Laura Buenning

Mays’s more than twenty-year fascination with the molecular structure of thermoplastic elasto-mers (TPEs) has led to the discovery of an extra- stretchy material with elasticity two to three times greater than the best material on the market. The catch is that the material is so advanced; there is no known market for it—yet.

In 2000, Mays teamed up with Roland Weidish from Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute and Sam Gido from the University of Massachusetts because they wanted to “understand how molecular architecture affects the performance of TPEs.” The result was a molecular shape that allows the material to stretch fifteen times its orig-inal length, yet recover almost completely when the stretching force is removed.

Last fall, the unique polymer architecture became the center of a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Partnerships for Innovation program, which encourages commer-cialization of new technology discovered through university research.

You’ve probably heard the expression “putting the cart before the horse.” But what about “having a solution before identifying the problem?” It’s not very catchy, but it reflects the conundrum UT chemistry professor Jimmy Mays is dealing with these days.

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“Right now [this] technology is in a very early stage,” says Joy Fisher, Anderson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation faculty mentor and co-principal investigator on the project. “We’ve got some prototype material with incred-ible characteristics, but we don’t know what kind of problem it solves. And if it doesn’t solve a prob-lem it will never make it to the market.”

Mays says a growing number of applications for TPEs exist today. You’ve likely seen them as the “stretchy, rubbery material used to affix objects to magazine covers.” They also are found in a wide variety of other products—surgical tubing, shoe soles, soft-touch bicycle handlebars, soft-handled toothbrushes, and medical adhe-sives. TPEs are also finding their way into inflat-able ear buds for digital hearing aids, exfoliating skin peels, and coronary stents.

Thanks to the NSF grant, the responsibility of identifying applications for this new technol-ogy, known as Superelastomer™, now lies with an interdisciplinary team of UT students consisting of Mike Koban and Logan Howell (both dual MS/MBA students), Andrew Goodwin (chemistry graduate student), and Ashley Hodges, Andrew Moore, Catherine Rolen, and Natalie Lubbert from the College of Law.

The students are using a Business Model Canvas method to quickly assess whether potential applications for the material can actually make it as commercial products. “You’ve got to find a market where there’s a real pain point with customers will-ing to pull money out of their pockets in exchange for the product,” Fisher says.

The first step is preparing a hypothesis—a value proposition—of what the team thinks customers will gain by using the product. Then they test their theory with real customers by developing a value chain consisting of nine interrelated elements.

The process involves determining who will make the raw material, who will process the raw material, whether a distribution network will be necessary, and who will retail the product.

“We have to identify potential customers in every single slice of that go-to-market value chain and figure out, ‘can we make something that will work its way through that chain and into the hands of the market at a price the customer will pay and we make money?’” Fisher says.

One possibility that came to light early was in the medical tubing industry.

“Superelastomer™ material is stronger, retains its strength, recovers quickly, and doesn’t kink, which is one problem with medical tubing. And as we were going through this process we also found that medical tubing is made with PVC, which uses chlorine as a pre-cursor and is bad for the environment,” Fisher explains. “But is it enough of a problem to keep people in the medical tubing industry up at night? If not, then this is not the right start-up market.”

At this point, every phone call provides new infor-mation for the team. “We always try to have the chemistry students on the line with us. That’s when it works the best, because a customer might ask ques-tions that our business students can’t answer. At the same time, the technical team can hear first hand from the customers what is and is not important to them,” Fisher adds.

“Chemistry students like this kind of project,” Mays says. “So much of chemistry is about making and characterizing a target molecule, writing a paper on it, and moving on to something else. This project does all that but then takes them into the real world where they work with people from business; they get pulled into meetings with professional investors. It opens them up to what it’s like to start a small business.”

As the team continues to gather vital information, any decisions they make will have a profound impact on the Superelastomer™ commercialization effort. “This is not a simulation,” Fisher says. “They are expected to come up with the right solution to the problem of find-ing the right problem for the solution.”

“We don’t know what kind of problem it solves. And if it doesn’t solve a problem it will never make it to the market.”Joy FisherProject co-PI and Anderson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation faculty mentor

“You’ve got to find a market where there’s a real pain point with customers.”Joy Fisher

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Natural ResilienceCommunities of microbes build relationships to make the modern world less toxic.

By Amanda Womac

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When an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform occurred in 2010, just over four million barrels of crude oil were released into the

Gulf of Mexico. Hundreds of people and a variety of tech-nologies were quickly deployed to help restore the area. But arguably, the most effective cleaning agent came in the form of naturally occurring oil-devouring bacteria.

Terry Hazen, UT/ORNL Governor’s Chair for Environmental Biotechnology, is an environmental biologist who specializes in bioremediation. In other words, he examines how bacteria break down and detoxify hazardous materials.

In the wake of the Gulf disaster, Hazen seized the oppor-tunity to advance his research. The result was a paper he co-authored that appeared on the cover of Environmental Microbiology, titled “Deep-Sea Bacteria Enriched by Oil and Dispersant from the Deepwater Horizon Spill.” It documented microbial communities and their natural ability to remove spilled oil from the environment.

“We are trying to look at and understand environmental systems from the molecular level right up through the eco-system level and everything in between,” Hazen says. “There’s a lot of hidden information. Ultimately, we want to understand how organisms create a community, as well as the resilience of the community.”

By studying the relationship between these communities, scientists hope to be able to calculate how they will react when pollutants such as hydrocarbons are introduced and, in turn, how that affects the overall ecosystem.

Certain microbes—primarily bacteria and fungi—are known to break down oil into carbon dioxide and water through a process similar to human digestion by harnessing the released energy to sustain themselves. Over millions of years, some bacteria developed the ability to produce enzymes specific to different aspects of the oil-degradation process. Basically, the bacteria have evolved to be picky eaters.

Hazen and his team investigated a group of organisms in the Gulf of Mexico that preferred to feast on alkanes—a satu-rated hydrocarbon consisting only of hydrogen and carbon atoms that is typically the dominant component in fuels. The team found that after the alkane-eating bacteria finished eating, the community structure changed and other bacteria stepped up to the buffet line.

“Once particular hydrocarbons were degraded, the com-munity switched and organisms that could effectively com-pete for what was left began to compete for food,” Hazen says. “We saw a natural progression of keystone species in the community as the oil degraded.”

The discovery got Hazen thinking about the pattern of succession and how species composition changes when dif-ferent hydrocarbons are introduced into the environment. He decided to recreate the Deepwater Horizon conditions in a lab to study transformations within the microbial community

“ We are trying to look at and understand environmental systems from the molecular level right up through the ecosystem level and everything in between.”Terry Hazen UT/ORNL Governor’s Chair for Environmental Biotechnology

Bacteria attacking a droplet of oil. Surface sample taken from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

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and determine which specific members could degrade oil, regardless of whether or not dispersants were used.

“Ultimately, we learned that microbial communities in the Gulf of Mexico have a high potential for degradation of oil and have adapted rapidly to the introduction of hydrocarbons,” Hazen says.

This knowledge could prove highly beneficial for similar cleanup and restoration efforts in the future. By knowing how microbial communities will behave in specific hydro-carbon-heavy areas, researchers will be better prepared to assist with immediate restoration. It also could potentially save money by curtailing the use of expensive chemical dispersants.

Interestingly, Hazen found that the bacteria do not just incorporate the oil into their bodies; they completely convert it into proteins, carbohydrates, and their DNA structure. The next step is to investigate how the molecular-level transfor-mation affects biological processes on the systems level.

“We want to understand how currents and weather affect the overall community,” Hazen says. “That’s why I say we are taking a biological systems approach.”

Understanding how these other factors influence microbial communities will help scientists evaluate how global climate change could alter their hydrocarbon degrading abilities.

As the demand for crude oil increases, the chances of future spills occuring also increase. Because of his work on the Deepwater Horizon spill, Hazen was named lead investi-gator for a multidisciplinary, multi-university research team funded by BP to study potential deep-sea drilling sites around the world and assess the environmental risks.

“This research will potentially give us some really exciting results,” Hazen says. “All of these sites are quite deep and might have different types of crude oil, which may help us understand the hydrocarbon transformations occurring in the microbial community and how different or similar they are at each site.”

Once scientists understand how the many variables affect microbial communities, they should be able to predict how the microbes will react to the introduction of hydrocarbons in their environment. Will they be as hungry as the ones in the Gulf? Or will the community structure change completely?

Hazen’s previous work on bioremediation technologies has lead to five patents. He recently submitted a proposal for a collaborative strategic environmental research development program that would involve scientists from a variety of disci-plines in studying the resilience of our natural world.

“Mother Nature has an incredible resiliency to clean herself up after we make a mess,” Hazen says. “I’m worried about the fact that in the Gulf of Mexico, she’s had too many cata-strophic events, and how resilient she actually is, but my hope is that this research will help us understand how resilient Mother Nature can be in the future.”

The bacteria do not just incorporate the oil into their bodies; they

completely convert it into proteins,

carbohydrates, and their DNA structure.

The next step is to investigate how

the molecular-level transformation affects

biological processes on the systems level.

Ships and drilling rigs continued to recover oil two months after the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

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Protecting Privilege

A thirty-second YouTube video of a toddler dancing to a Prince song

encapsulates several major legal problems specific to the digital age—the ambiguities surrounding copyright, fair use, privacy, and attorney-client privilege.

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Although fewer than thirty people had watched the video before it was initially pulled, the lawsuit it spawned could have far-reaching effects, according to Paula Schaefer, associate professor in the UT College of Law.

The back story for the case is fairly simple. In February 2007, Stephanie Lenz posted a short video of her eighteen-month-old child dancing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.” In June of that year, Lenz received an e-mail from YouTube saying her video had been removed at the request of Universal Music Publishing Group, the largest recording label in the industry and the copyright administrator for the song. Lenz filed a counter-notice to have the video restored, and it was, six weeks later.

The legal issues quickly multiplied. Lenz filed a civil lawsuit against Universal claiming the company was abusing the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by ordering YouTube to remove videos that were, like hers, “self-evident non-infringing fair use.” In August 2008, a US District Court ruled that copyright owners must consider fair use when issuing takedown notices under the DMCA.

But the litigation continued. Universal claimed that Lenz had discussed “privileged” information pertaining to the case on her blog, in e-mail messages, and during online chat conversations with third parties, thus waiv-ing her right to keep this information private as part of attorney-client privilege. In these messages and chats, Lenz shared factual allegations and information on legal strategies she discussed with her attorneys without real-izing the legal repercussions.

“Voluntary disclosures that compromise confiden-tiality have always resulted in privilege waiver,” says Schaefer. “It was easy for Lenz to voluntarily spread information about this case, and it was easy for Universal to find out that she revealed this information publicly.”

The court ruled Lenz willingly waived the privilege as to her communications with counsel, and it ordered docu-ments previously withheld on the basis of privilege to be released. Lenz’s larger case against Universal is ongoing.

Schaefer notes that the number of cases like Lenz’s—where the attorney or client intentionally or inadvertently discloses privileged data—has risen in recent years due to a sharp increase in electronic communication.

During the discovery phase of a suit, lawyers on both sides have the right to ask each other for documents relevant to the case in question. Twenty years ago, this may have meant a box full of paper, including printed reports and typed letters. Today, it often means sifting through hundreds or thousands of e-mail messages,

including threads or conversations containing a mix of privileged and nonprivileged information.

During this process—known as electronic discovery, or e-discovery—separating the privileged statements from the unprotected ones can be extremely complex and time-consuming. Sometimes privileged information may inadvertently leak through to the opposing side. Protections in place for these situations can include “clawback agreements,” where attorneys define the cir-cumstances in which an inadvertent disclosure will not result in privilege waiver.

“Both the attorney and client must protect privilege. Attorneys have to ensure clients know how to protect privilege. They have to explain that it’s protected by keeping attorney-client communications confidential,” says Schaefer, a leading expert on e-discovery.

Schaefer explains that the Lenz case spotlights the importance of attorneys and clients familiarizing them-selves with how to protect privilege. Clients must be reminded that any communications made, received, or accessed through a work computer belonging to a third party may not be considered privileged. Likewise, blog, Facebook, and Twitter posts are not necessarily pro-tected, regardless of the user’s privacy settings.

“The biggest threat to privilege is the sheer volume of information and how impossible it is to protect that information from being accidentally turned over to the other side. Clawback agreements are one tool to protect information, but attorneys sometimes think they’ve pro-tected themselves when they really haven’t,” Schaefer remarks. “Attorneys need to educate themselves about how to draft more effective clawback agreements.”

The attorney-client privilege is not at risk because attorneys and clients don’t understand modern technol-ogy. The problem is that technology is so prevalent that it can be hard to keep track of, let alone control, what gets transmitted digitally, Schaefer says. The real risks to privilege are the ease of disseminating information in public forums like Facebook, the large volume of infor-mation contained in e-mail conversations or blog posts, and attorneys’ understanding of laws allowing them to protect against privilege waiver.

“Technology threatens attorney-client privilege, but that doesn’t mean attorneys and clients shouldn’t use e-mail or have blogs. Education of lawyers and clients on keeping information private and the tools that are out there to protect privileged information is the key. With an understanding of this legal knowledge gap, we can educate our clients and ourselves to better protect the privilege in the information age,” Schaefer concludes.

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Faster Than Real Time

Lee Han takes his students behind the wheel at UT’s Transportation Systems Laboratory.

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Faster Than Real TimeCReaTING a TRaffIC SImULaTIoN SySTem So advaNCed, IT may RevoLUTIoNIze THe woRLd of TRaNSPoRTaTIoN.

Approximately one hour after a 9.0 magnitude earth-quake occurred off the coast of Japan in 2011, a power-ful tsunami hit the country’s northeast coastline. Surging water obliterated entire cities in just minutes, leaving emer-gency personnel very little time to figure out how to effectively evacuate the area while trying to save the lives of residents trapped under rubble and debris.

This is the type of night-mare scenario that has inspired Lee Han, UT profes-sor of civil and environmen-tal engineering, to devise a revolutionary traffic planning system to deal with such emergencies.

By Theresa Pepin

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Together, Han and his phalanx of stu-dents are building the foundation for a faster-than-real-time traffic simulation pro-gram that operates more than 1,000 times quicker than anything currently available.

At UT’s Transportation Systems Laboratory (TSL), Han and his team con-tinually test, compile data, and develop multiple models in preparation for every-thing from everyday traffic congestion to extreme emergency management.

In describing his work, Han mentions the terms “microscopic” and “large scale” at the same time. While constructing large-scale models capable of projecting a range of predictive scenarios for decision making in

time to avert citywide or regional catastrophe, traffic engineers must also ground those systems in the behaviors and experiential learning of indi-vidual drivers; the “microscopic” evidence from where, as Han says, “the rubber meets the road.”

For example, realistic field situations where vehicles, road configurations, traffic laws, driving customs and cultures, lighting, and weather con-ditions are vastly different must be considered. In order to extend and generalize the research, Han’s students have traveled to many different countries to collect driving behavior data.

In traffic simulation, it is also critical to overcome the sequential nature of traditional models—a major constraint holding back the potential gains of applying complex parallel

an example of heavy traffic congestion in China.

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computational sciences. At the microscopic level, sequential in the context of driving refers to the idiosyncratic behaviors and reaction times of drivers as they follow behind other vehicles, change lanes on the interstate at high speed, look for gaps to turn, navigate stop-and-go city driving, and idle in frustrating traffic jams.

The benefits of a successful, large-scale traffic simulation system are many: smoother driving on shorter commutes; increased safety and fuel savings; emission reductions; and heightened security in the event of terrorist attacks, mass evacuations, and major accidents.

However, this complex technique requires massive amounts of real-time data of all differ-ent types to ensure the simulations in the lab are closely mimicking and timely relevant to the real world. The system must be dynamic enough to keep up with the endless stream of data from a growing number of highway and on-board wire-less sensors.

The computational tasks of handling both the data and calculations are clearly daunting; however, they have been addressed by a Joint Directed Research and Development grant that allows Han to take advantage of the petascale supercomputing facilities at the nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“The shared ambition of tackling a very chal-lenging sequential problem with parallel means has been a driving force behind the collabora-tion,” Han says. He has begun to ponder the

complex algorithms required for multiple models that can be crunched simultaneously by ORNL’s Titan supercomputer, capable of processing 20 petaflops, or 20 trillion calculations, per second.

Several of those models are based upon the structure of the honeycomb, an organizing prin-ciple for developing new algorithms that captures the critical importance of both the boundaries—highway edges, lane lines, and vehicular bodies known as “force fields”—and the “holes”—open-ings in traffic flow—in the space on the road.

“Anyone who has traveled widely can appreci-ate the importance of models and calculations that exploit the shifting force fields and holes in traffic, because for drivers in many cultures, lane lines are merely a suggestion,” Han says.

As Han’s traffic flow optimization and simula-tion models continue to undergo validation and refinement, the promise of a safer world without traffic jams crawls closer to reality. And while no one can predict the future, the ability to make pre-dictions and test them ahead of time in a virtual environment will make it easier to keep up with the present—especially when disaster strikes or chaos threatens.

The system must be dynamic enough to keep up with the endless stream of data from a growing number of highway and on-board wireless sensors.

The honeycomb algorithm reveals six times the resolution of a traditional model with a simplistic grid as vehicles stay in lane, ride between lanes, change lanes, and turn.

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never occupied a seat on a presidential cabinet, organized a political move-ment, or faced down Chinese government tanks. Nevertheless, his theory of justice has found its way to all those places.

As a philosopher, Rawls is regarded by many as the preeminent political thinker of our age. His criti-cism of the “welfare state” for marginalizing and undermining the self-respect of capable, produc-tive citizens influenced President Clinton’s 1996 sweeping reform of the US welfare system. And his belief that all citizens have a valid claim to the basic resources needed to make meaningful use of their liberties helped to shape President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.

Acts of nonviolent protest, from Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to render taxes to a government that condoned slavery to the civil rights marches in the Jim Crow South, reflect Rawls’s insistence that civil disobedience in the face of grossly unjust laws is not merely a citizen’s right but an obligation. His argument for the priority of extensive and consti-tutionally assured basic liberties helped rouse the Chinese student protestors who, in 1989, amassed in Tiananmen Square. According to media reports, some of the protestors brandished copies of

More THAN Just A theoryOne of the twentieth century’s most insightful political theorists is also a major force behind the transformation of philosophical studies at UT.

Rawls’s magnum opus, A Theory of Justice (1971), in the faces of government oppressors.

For the lay reader, Rawls’s writing can drift into the ether and address theories and principles that seem remote from the day-to-day travails that occupy members of our diverse democracy. “But Rawls was writing for and about us as free equals; the joint authors of our institutions and collective actions,” says David Reidy, Rawls scholar and head of the UT Department of Philosophy.

At one point, it was feared that Rawls’s work might lose its relevance. But thanks to Reidy and a newly formed cluster of scholars under his direction, UT has become a premier destination for the study of Rawls’s theory of just democratic societies.

Reidy first read A Theory of Justice as an under-graduate at DePauw University in the early 1980s. “It’s a difficult book,” he says, “and I didn’t under-stand much of it at the time.”

After earning a law degree from Indiana University in 1987 and beginning his graduate stud-ies in philosophy at the University of Kansas, Reidy became reacquainted with Rawls’s book and expe-rienced something of an epiphany: “All of a sudden, the book spoke to me in a way that it hadn’t before,” says Reidy. He came to the realization that Rawls

By David Brill

Chinese students protest for social justice in Tiananmen Square, China, 1989.

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More THAN Just A theoryOne of the twentieth century’s most insightful political theorists is also a major force behind the transformation of philosophical studies at UT.

was addressing a practical question faced by all democratic citizens: How can we reasonably and fairly exercise the political power that is given to us?

Midway through Reidy’s graduate studies, Rawls published a second book, Political Liberalism, and Reidy saw “an opportunity to enter, at ground level, the conversation that was going to happen about it.” He also discerned a reasonable focus for his future academic career.

As Reidy drafted his dissertation, two fortu-itous things happened. First, in October 1995, Reidy attended a symposium commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of A Theory of Justice at Santa Clara University, where he was able to meet Rawls.

Second, in 1996, Rawls published a revised edi-tion of Political Liberalism. Reidy had kept in contact with Rawls after meeting him in Santa Clara and followed up with phone calls to discuss the new edi-tion. The timing allowed Reidy to produce a disser-tation that “was about as current and informed on Rawls’s latest work as anything could be.”

Reidy’s dissertation—a finalist for the 1996–98 Council of Graduate Schools Dissertation Award—gained him national visibility and quickly led to a number of publications on Rawls, including articles

in Res Publica and the Journal of Social Philosophy.After joining UT’s Department of Philosophy in

2000, Reidy sought a short-term, high-profile proj-ect that would earn him tenure. Rawls, once again, intervened.

In 1999, Rawls published his third book, The Law of Peoples, in which he set out the principles that a just democracy should follow in its relationships with other nations. The book, which Reidy describes as “shorter and less ambitious” than A Theory of Justice, received consistently negative reviews in scholarly literature. “Even some of the leading pro-ponents of Rawls’s earlier work trashed the book,” says Reidy. “I felt they were missing its point.”

In Reidy’s view, the book, though overshadowed by the enormously influential A Theory of Justice, advanced a number of worthy ideals. But to act as Rawls’s defender would require knowledge of inter-national law, human rights, and foreign policy. Reidy spent the next year and a half boning up before publishing a series of articles defending The Law of Peoples against “waves of criticism.” As he did, the scholarly tide began to turn.

“By 2006, a sizeable group of influential scholars who had been mostly silent came out in support

of Rawls’s book,” says Reidy. His defense not only helped establish the merit of Rawls’s final work, it also helped Reidy earn tenure.

Following Rawls’s death in 2002, Reidy detected a “creeping thought among philosophers that we had entered a post-Rawlsian phase,” he says. “I thought that was entirely premature.”

Reidy set out to secure Rawls’s continued rel-evance by articulating the “synoptic vision that Rawls had of his own work.” In 2008, he garnered a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to peruse Rawls’s archived papers and inter-view family members and former colleagues.

Reidy is now at work on a monograph, ten-tatively titled John Rawls: A Democratic Vision, and has forthcoming two edited collections, The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon and The Blackwell Companion to Rawls.

Reidy’s reputation has attracted other like-minded academics to his department, including three promising philosophers with substantial interests in Rawls: Adam Cureton, Jon Garthoff, and Markus Kohl. Together, they are an impressive lot: a Rhodes Scholar and two Woodrow Wilson “Newcombe” Fellows with advanced degrees from Oxford, UCLA, Berkeley, and UNC-Chapel Hill.

UT’s Rawlsian research cluster is also attracting graduate students from around the world, includ-ing doctoral students and visiting scholars from the People’s Republic of China, one of whom serves as China’s leading translator of Rawls’s collected papers.

“Beyond our interest in understanding and extending Rawls’s own work, we’re influenced by his approach to doing philosophy, which regards the history of philosophy as relevant to contempo-rary questions,” says Cureton.

Rawls lived just long enough to see the dawn of the new millennium. If he were alive today, he would undoubtedly be disappointed that social and political justice continue to elude countless millions around the globe. But it’s also likely that he would find solace in the notion that his idea of a just and fair polity, as Reidy continues to demonstrate, remains relevant—even vital—to a world ever strug-gling to find its way.

“ Rawls was writing for and about us as free equals; the joint authors of our institutions and collective actions.” David Reidy, Rawls scholar and head of the UT Department of Philosophy

SPRING 201336

Unexpected

SometimeS a Seemingly inSignificant deciSion can totally change the coUrSe of an academic career.

Results

Grace Levin adds a new informant to the research team’s ‘string board’—a map that helps identify connections between stakeholders in skilled migration.

37

UnexpectedBy Sharon Pound

SometimeS a Seemingly inSignificant deciSion can totally change the coUrSe of an academic career.

Results Each year,

thousands of bright and talented students arrive at UT with immeasurable promise, but they are sometimes a little unclear about where to devote their creative energy. For many upperclassmen, an undergraduate research experience helps them discover and define their passion. Grace Levin is a shining example.

As an “undecided” freshman, Levin took a class taught by Micheline van Riemsdijk, assistant profes-sor of geography. Impressed by Levin’s performance, van Riemsdijk persuaded her to sign up for an under-graduate research experience the next semester, even though she would “only” be a sophomore.

Levin’s first foray into the realm of research involved conducting literature searches and fact-finding about the recruitment practices of human resource managers in the information technology industry in Bangalore, India. Concurrently, she developed her own indepen-dent project using many of the same research methods to write a paper on microfinance.

“I didn’t start college intending to conduct research in the geography department,” Levin says. “But work-ing on a major project revealed many facets that appealed to my interests.”

Levin’s first paper, “Critique of Microcredit as a Development Model,” was published in the University of Tennessee’s Pursuit Undergraduate Research Journal, and won a division award at UT’s Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement (EURēCA) in 2012. The paper detailed her investiga-tion of the 2010 microfinance crisis in Andhra Pradesh, India, during which a large number of Indian farmers committed suicide. The crisis was attributed to pres-sure by lending institutions to repay exploitive loans.

“This work showed me that we are connected in ways not previously understood,” says Levin, referring to a common sentiment in the United States that we live in a bubble, seemingly untouched by the impact of unstable loaning practices in developing countries.

Levin is now a junior honors student double- majoring in global studies and sustainability with minors in geography and French. Her most recent project involved a month-long trip to Oslo, Norway,

supporting van Riemsdijk’s investigation into stake-holder involvement in skilled migration policymaking. Initially, the project focused on the recruitment and retention of international skilled workers in the informa-tion technology industry.

While in Oslo, they set up shop at the Institute for Labor and Social Research and gathered empirical data by speaking with officials and executives familiar with the issue of skilled migration. As the project pro-gressed, Levin assisted by developing probing interview questions and conducting interviews. She also was responsible for contacting and arranging interviews with human resources managers in Kongsberg, a city located fifty-four miles southwest of Oslo.

“Throughout this project, I kept getting affirmations that I could do this,” Levin says.

Living with a group of Norwegian students and observing a culturally different work environment greatly enhanced Levin’s research experience, which was made possible by UT’s Undergraduate Research Summer Internship program and the Ready for the World Initiative.

After returning home and analyzing the data, it became clear that the information technology indus-try in Norway is not as internationally diverse as van Riemsdijk and her team expected. Consequently, the study is being expanded to include the oil and gas industry. The analysis indicated that independent con-sultants play a key role by establishing connections between local actors and international companies. They also discovered that immigration organizations provide valuable cultural capital to newcomers by organizing events that teach about local and national culture.

For her involvement, Levin says the project has given her confidence, sharpened her communications skills, and helped shape career plans that have shifted from “undecided” to a near-certain focus on sustainability.

An active, service-oriented individual, Levin has dis-covered her personal concern lies with the apathy of society toward making smart decisions that could sus-tain our planet and quality of life.

“I want to help people live better lifestyles without telling them what to do,” she says. “A sustainable planet is an investment, a worthy goal.”

As she winds up her junior year, Levin is contemplat-ing her next steps. Although she can’t pinpoint exactly what her future holds, she has definitely been bitten by the research bug.

“I don’t think I could simply work with theory,” Levin says. “If I go to graduate school, the opportunity to be involved in research will be a deciding factor.”D

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